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Previously
on Ether Street... Three NI readers have
contacted an irascible ghost called Nil who claims to have been
intimate with Lenin.
Don't
give us this. How come everyone who 'discovers' they had a past
life was always famous enough to appear in the history books:
they were Mary Queen of Scots, or Crazy Horse, or they went
down on the Titanic. They're never just Abdul Salim, who lived
and died in obscurity upstairs from the shoemaker in twelfth-century
Baghdad...
Oh you knew Abdul too, did you? Of course I've had plenty of
lives that were unremarkable to all but me. I've fished in the
Andaman Sea; I've been a child that died of cholera in Lahore
during the British Raj; I've loved and lost more men and women
than you would wish to hear about who were all the world to
me at the time.
Okay, cut the schmaltz. Maybe you had better stick to people
we've heard of, after all.
You see? I give you the bold bread of my lives and you just
want circuses.
No, we want meaning, some insight that will prove useful
in our own lives. That's what other people get from the spirit
world, so why shouldn't we?
Why not indeed? I presume you're thinking along the lines of
who's going to win the 3.15 horse race at Uttoxeter next Friday.
Nothing so crass and material.
Maybe it's the spiritual you're after. I do a good line in Upanishads.
Upaniwhat?
The Upanishads. One of the key Hindu texts from 2,700 years
ago. Seems like only yesterday we were brainstorming for it,
yet people all over the world are still reading or speaking
the words every day: 'It is not knowing. It is not unknowing.
Nor is it knowingness itself. It can neither be seen nor understood...
It is known only through becoming it.'
Just what we wanted: 'something that can't be understood'.
Some people are never satisfied: one of the greatest spiritual
insights humanity has come up with, and you give it two out
of ten for technical merit.
We were thinking more along the lines of something that would
be politically useful, that would let us out of the Clinton/Blair/Schroder
straitjacket.
You don't mean you cast doubt upon the Truth, the Light and
the Way?!
Surely
you see that transnational corporations have simply got on with
the business of wealth creation while you whingers on the fringes
tie yourselves up in ethical knots. They saw the Earth franchise
was up for grabs...
Someone who took part in the Russian Revolution can't really
believe this garbage.
Why not? Bill Clinton once was sensible enough to dodge the
draft and sample the odd mindblowing substance and he now believes
this garbage. Tony Blair believes it too and even he did once
have a socialist idea in his head... No, on second thoughts,
maybe that's going too far.
You said before that you could offer package tours to people's
brains for the more intrepid spirits. Does that mean you have
actually been inside Bill Clinton's head?
Don't even ask me.
Why, what was it like? Come on, don't be a tease.
Funnily enough, that's one of his favourite lines when a new
intern looms into view. Actually Clinton has a design fault
which has left him with only three basic thoughts: 'I'm gorgeous';
'You're gorgeous'; and 'God Bless America'. The rumour up here
is that Bill's next incarnation is already waiting for him in
a radiation-ravaged village in rural Iraq.
Next month: Nil muses on Henry Ford's karma and the
futility of war.
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New
Internationalist 324
